Behind the Scenes: Car HMI Animation

The reason I invested myself so much in 3D, is because I believed, it's the designer skill of the future. With all the trends pointing to VR, augmented reality and more immersive applications and games, it just made sense to be part of it. Even if it's way down the road.

Yes, I've mostly created illustration work so far, but we need a way to hone our skill and make some living while at it. And doing illustration work for the digital brands is still the best entry point into the 3D industry in my opinion.

But from time to time, I need to circle back to my original idea. To help to create and build immersive 3D worlds and interactions. And luckily, some of that future is already here. If you have a look at automotive industry, it made a huge leap past two years or so.

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You basically can't find a new car model, without at least some touch screen with immersive 3D imaging. All of the new EV's coming into the market have changed the landscape and now even the combustion models have to keep up in some way.

I've explored the technology and found out that Unity and Unreal engines are investing big in the space, and that actually you can already find some cars, that are running Unreal Engine, for example new Hummer EV.

But before you actually start building the the real working interface, you need to communicate your vision, your thoughts. Let's say you're a part of the team working on this tech and you need to bring in some ideas for the interface. When we build mobile apps, we create animated screen mockups to test our ideas, and I guess it's similar here.

And I think Blender is a great tool to model and animate your vision. I've tried to create an example of such prototype work and researched some of the HMI screens on Pinterest. I really loved one screen, where charging progress was visible on the car model, in the same place the real battery is placed (underneath the car).

So I set myself to create a short animation. A transition from the home view screen to the X-ray style view of the car with visible battery. I wanted to create the whole UI composite, but the time was a bit tight, so I ended up with car modeling, shading and animation process.

So I guess, it's an opportunity to continue this some other time, refine the prototype and build the whole interface, maybe even bring it into game engine to make it really work.

You can watch the process video on Youtube